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Website usability testing identifies a precise methodology devoted to uncover specific bugs, idiosyncrasies and ambiguities in the way that website design impacts the effective use, legibility, navigation, and user experience of your website. In this MasterNewMedia guide you can find the best free website usability testing tools available out there.

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Website usability testing is indeed a critical component of any effective online publishing strategy. When properly utilized, usability testing allows you to effectively scan and rapidly identify which are the critical issues to be addressed in your web publication that can improve legibility, the time visitors spend on your website or the ability to turn offers for products and services into actual conversions.

In fact, what\’s the point of having valuable content under your hood if your readers cannot easily discover it, share it and put it to effective use?

To be of immediate “use“, let me share first with you a simple set of basic tasks you can follow to start testing and reviewing the usability of your own website:

1. Identify a critical goal: Likely, you have multiple goals for your website. The first step is to focus on the most critical. Is it sales? Is it traffic? Is it help people find something?
2. Use Personas: Create typical users profiles to best focus on potential needs and expectations of a fictional target group. Is your website addressed to experts in the filed or to a general audience? Do you want to attract loyal readers or occasional stumblers? Which age / sex / location are your users?
3. Carry on critical tasks: After identifying your goals and creating typical users profiles (Personas), you want some friends, readers or volunteers, to carry on critical tasks on your website to identify areas for improvement and weaknesses. Is the sale process straightforward? Can people download your content easily? Are your blog posts easily shareable on social media?
4. Collect the data: While your users go through a set of pre-determined tasks and perform specific actions on your website, you need to closely observe and report where they hesitate, step back, or remain confused by what they see on your site. Better yet, you can use a dedicated usability tool that collects absolute or relative data that can help you characterize the behavior of your testers.
5. Review your analysis: Once you gather this data, you need to group it in clear-labeled groups (i.e. navigation, layout, functional flow, error handling, etc.), so that you can easily review and analyze all of this information and then find the ideal strategy to make your improvements.

Now that you know what are the key steps needed to start a website usability test, what you really need is knowing which tools or services are available out there that you can immediately put to use to support, speed up and professionally organize those very tasks.

But how can you identify and select which is the most appropriate website usability testing tool for your specific needs, competence level and budget?

To help you get started right away, this guide provides you with a set of individual reviews, a comparative table and a comprehensive mindmap to help you select your ideal free website usability testing tool.

Please note that these free usability testing tools have a limited range of features. For example, they do not allow you to record the screen of your testers or engage them in screen-sharing sessions unlike professional usability testing solutions like TechSmith Morae, which will be covered in a separate upcoming MasterNewMedia guide.

Now that I have warned you about the limitations of these free website usability testing tools, here below are the specific selection criteria that I have used to compare these different services:

• Testing approach: a) Test the usability of your website by inviting specific users to share their feedback, b) analyze analytic and statistical data.
• Analytics: Generate automatic analytical data from each website usability testing tool to evaluate the the quality of your website design and user interface.
• Visualization of user behavior: Visualize the behavior of your visitors by analyzing where they click or look (via mouse tracking) on your website and which path they follow to carry on specific tasks.
• Usability report: Generate a comprehensive report that contains all the analytical data gathered by the usability test.

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Does your online business use a disruptive innovation approach? In other words: have you ever considered getting a huge advantage over your competition by developing a business strategy that is a completely different way from what everyone else in your field does?

Photo credit: Kheng Guan Toh

Disruptive innovation is a term used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers. (Source: Wikipedia)

Disruptive innovation happens when a breakthrough development opens new and unexpected scenarios for future development and / or improves an existing product.

Scott Anthony, author of the book The Innovator\’s Guide to Growth, points out that is not necessarily a new technology that drives disruptive innovation: “many times the technology is quite trivial. It is the business model, the way a company organizes and acts that drives disruption“.

To support this statement, Scott provides two examples. Walmart and the Nintendo Wii:

• When Walmart opened its first discount retailer in 1962, it was not doing something special by selling goods that were different than its competitors. What Walmart did instead, was to revolutionize its business policy by focusing on very low prices and on discount retailing.
• Instead of introducing games with better graphics, Nintendo has made it simpler and more accessible to play a videogame by introducing the Wiimote, an innovative game controller. Nintendo has consciously tried to target the non-gamers, and by doing so, it has greatly expanded the market for videogames and started to lead the future path of the gaming industry.

In both these examples, technology is either not relevant or very marginal to create disruption, whereas is the ability to solve real problems or to address new audiences the key to create effective disruptive innovation opportunities.

In fact, for Scott disruptive innovation generally occurs in those markets where some kind of constraints inhibit developments, and when specific needs of customers are not properly addressed. When such barriers to consumption are torn down, you are effectively creating space for disruption to take place.

If you want to know how you can facilitate, identify and enable disruptive innovation inside your organization, you will hear about some interesting and inspiring stories in this video interview with Scott Anthony himself.

Here is what he had to say (full video and transcription):
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Web widgets are tiny applications that allow you to easily distribute your content across other blogs and web sites, free of charge. Web widgets work just like YouTube videos: you can place a widget on your web site and let readers grab the embed code and redistribute your content with a few clicks. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best tools and services to create a widget for the web, your desktop environment or specific platforms like WordPress, Blogger or Yahoo!.

Photo credit: Nagravision

Web widgets belong to two main categories:

a) Embeddable: You just grab the standard snippet of embed code of the widget and paste it onto the HTML code of your blog site. You can even add widgets to your favorite social media sites like Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, and others.

b) Not-embeddable: You need to run a widget platform on your computer. All recent Windows and Mac machines already have this feature built-in, while Linux users can install and use Screenlets. Windows XP and early Mac users can instead try a third-party widget platform like Yahoo! Widgets.

By creating a web widget you create small bits of information that virally spread across the web making your content more visible, interactive and usable. RSS feeds, image slideshows, videos, Flash applications… widgets can be used to package and deliver almost every type of digital information.

Let\’s see some examples of how you can leverage the power of web widgets:

• By creating a widgets that displays a selection of RSS feeds you can create a niche-targeted newsradar which provides valuable and always-updated information on a topic that interests your audience.
• By building a widget that embeds a poll or a survey, you may collect useful data and insights into your audience. And because web widgets are so freely redistributable, you may also reach well beyond your circle of fans and supporters with no effort.
• By creating a compilations of your best blog posts, video, podcasts, you can distribute your top-notch content in a way that readers never miss the valuable information you share, even if it\’s not freshly published.
• By building a Flash widget you can create a Google Maps that shares the location of your next conference or meeting so that your fans can join you and participate to your events.
• By creating a chat widget you can really establish a “conversation” with your readers and customers and also build your online persona.

These are just a few quick suggestions, but as you see, web widgets are really suitable for a number of different uses.

The next step you need to take now is: there are several widget creation tools available online, either free or for a reasonable fee, but how do you go about selecting your ideal one?

To help you identify a widget creation tool that really suits your needs, here below there is a set of comparative tables and individual reviews to help you choose your preferred solution.

Here are the specific selection criteria used to compare these different services

• Widget type: Technology or coding language used to build and distribute web widgets
• Pre-made templates: Readily-available templates that you can use to style your web widget.
• Social sharing: Built-in facility to re-distribute your web widget across web sites or social media services.
• Analytics: Real-time performance monitoring of your web widget (how many times your widget is shared, by whom, on which destinations, etc.)
• Registration-free: Non-mandatory registration to utilize the widget creation tool.
• Price: Cost of the widget creation tool / service.

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